Protein sources for vege­tar­i­ans

Central Otago Mirror
- 2016-09-21
- WHAT’S ON
- I’ve re­cently turned veg­e­tar­ian and ev­ery­one seems to be wor­ried that I’m not get­ting enough protein. What are some good sources of veg­e­tar­ian protein? Shaun. No mat­ter what I eat I of­ten find my­self with re­flux and heart­burn. What’s the best way to deal

Hi Shaun. Choos­ing a goodqual­ity veg­e­tar­ian diet (there are poor-nu­tri­tional-qual­ity veg­e­tar­ian di­ets) means the ma­jor­ity of your diet is plant­based, which is fan­tas­tic. Here are some great veg­e­tar­ian sources of protein: you with protein, too. They can be pre­pared and eaten in sim­i­lar ways to tra­di­tional grains such as oats and rice.

❚ Eggs – some vege­tar­i­ans still con­sume eggs, which are a great source of bi­o­log­i­cally avail­able protein.

Hi Craig. Adults with re­flux or in­di­ges­tion tend to as­sume that the burn­ing sen­sa­tion they ex­pe­ri­ence with heart­burn means they are pro­duc­ing too much acid when the re­al­ity is usu­ally the op­po­site. They may not be mak­ing enough stomach acid and/or the pH of it is too high. To un­der­stand this, con­sider that your food is a string of cir­cles and that stomach acid plays a vi­tal role in break­ing the cir­cles apart.

A pH that is much higher than the ideal 1.9 can­not ef­fec­tively break the cir­cles apart, leav­ing larger, undi­gested seg­ments that can­not be fur­ther bro­ken down to con­tinue along the di­ges­tive tract. Rather than al­low­ing that food to pro­ceed down into the small in­tes­tine for the next part of its jour­ney, the body re­gur­gi­tates the food in an at­tempt to get rid of it. We then ex­pe­ri­ence the acid burn and as­sume it is too acidic when in fact it is not acidic enough to break the food down prop­erly and al­low it to pass into the small in­tes­tine.

It ‘burns’ you be­cause any­thing with an acid pH that is too acidic for the tis­sue to which is ex­posed will cre­ate a burn­ing sen­sa­tion. When the acid is con­tained in­side the stomach it­self, all is well, but when it es­capes out of this area, it af­fects the lin­ing of the oe­soph­a­gus, which is not de­signed to cope with such acidic con­tents. Many peo­ple with re­flux re­spond very well to the stim­u­la­tion of stomach acid and ex­pe­ri­ence

much fewer symp­toms as a re­sult. For oth­ers, they are eat­ing foods that they can’t cur­rently tol­er­ate and a di­etary trial omit­ting the sus­pect food/s may be war­ranted un­der the su­per­vi­sion of a health pro­fes­sional.

Stomach acid pro­duc­tion is stim­u­lated by the aroma of food and by chew­ing. His­tor­i­cally, we used to take much longer to pre­pare our meals and the aro­mas of the up­com­ing meal gen­er­ated by slower cook­ing pro­cesses sig­nalled to the stomach that food was on its way.

Chew­ing also alerts the brain to send a mes­sage to the stomach to let it know that food is on its way. When we in­hale our food, how­ever, this doesn’t hap­pen.

An­other way to phys­i­cally stim­u­late the pro­duc­tion of stomach acid is by con­sum­ing ap­ple cider vine­gar. If you haven’t had this be­fore, it is ini­tially best to di­lute it and, ide­ally con­sume it five to 20 min­utes be­fore break­fast (or all of your main meals if that ap­peals).